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Saturday, September 01, 2007

I heard the phone ring... It's the wee hours of the morning. I normally turn off my cell phone but I got home late and it was still in my pants crumbled in the bathroom. I get out of bed walk towards the phone - I grab it and walk towards the balcony. I need to take the call without waking up my pregnant wife.

It was the president of this company I was doing some consulting for. I did a double take - that was his number on the caller id. I had met him once during my initial interview and he just signed the checks after that. He sounded frantic and told me he had a laptop with him in Chicago and he needed to have some software installed so he found a "local techie" to install it for him. They managed to sabotage the laptop so it would only come up to a log in screen. He described what was going on.

You log in get an error box with no writing and a big red X. Your only options are click ok or cancel and either way you get...

Logging Off...

He told me that they want $500 to get it back up and running. They say it needs some kind of part. A hard disk...

I told him to bring it back home - don't pay them a penny.

He brought it to me 9am and said I need it back by 2pm to catch a 3:30 flight. That would be pushing it for me or you but he has a service that flys him via helicopter from the west side to JFK. Its good to be the king.

I booted it up and as sure as he said it. I log in and it logs me out. I boot to Knoppix and poke around a bit. Nothing out of the ordinary, I search for new files, services and programs - nada.

I actually browsed to system32 and then to restore and ran rstrui.exe in that directory. Bam system restore popped up and I rolled her back a few days, It said the system name was changed to some unrecognizable characters. It asked me if I was sure I wanted to undo those changes. I said OKAY! And sure as shit I restarted to their desktop! Success - Then what did I do?

Yup - I backed up young admin, I backed up. I'm off to give it back working as usual.

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